Saturday, December 6, 2014

Post Orwell: Dick Cheney

Very interesting analysis by J.J. Goldberg in the current issue
of the Forward** of the bill before the Knesset to decree Israel a Jewish
state, which it is already understood to be, anyway, going back to the U.N.
vote to partition Palestine between Jewish and Arab states.

Goldberg’s point is that the Israeli right led by Netanyahu
wants to extinguish whatever faint hope there is of Oslo, and a two-state
solution. It wants to absorb the Palestinian population of the West Bank into a
Greater Israel.

What about the fact that the Arab population might soon
exceed the Jewish?

No problem. Israel is a Jewish — an extra-Jewish — state. If
Arabs want to live in a super-Jewish state, that's OK as long as they accept
the rules of being Arab in a meta-Jewish state.

This is a bad dream, right?

But: Netanyahu is dissolving the current government and
calling for elections in the hope of expelling centrists and arriving at a government
of his nationalist Likud allied with various assortments of the religious
parties. This is just the coalition to achieve final demolition of two-state
hopes and with it Israel's claims to be a regarded as a democracy.